We were in Petra. We climbed long and hard to the Monastery – not a monastery in fact but perhaps used by the Byzantines as a church.

But for me, the most moving moment was to escape from the crowds and sit on the very “edge of the world” with screes and wadis tumbling down to the distant flat Dead Sea plain, all in brilliant sunshine. Birds wheeling below above the great heights.

One feels in the very edge of vast tumbling precipice and feel the cooling wind on one’s face.